Research

My work asks how cells sense, respond to, and are reprogrammed by environmental change. I have worked across structural biology, translational control, neuroscience, innate and adaptive immunity, and host-pathogen biology.

Mechanism

Much of my earlier work focused on the integrated stress response, including structural and mechanistic studies of eIF2B regulation by stress and a cognition-enhancing small molecule ISRIB. That work combined structural biology with biochemical reasoning to explain how stress signaling could be allosterically modulated at the level of nucleotide exchange.

Context dependence

More recently, I have been interested in why biological findings often fail to cleanly transfer across systems. In endosomal escape, for example, independent CRISPR screens and decades of literature point to conflicting genes and pathways. Rather than treating those differences as noise, I am interested in formalizing when they reflect context, when they reflect assay design, and how we can tell the difference.

Evaluation

I am increasingly drawn to evaluation methodologies for AI-driven biological discovery. Biology is expensive to validate, highly context dependent, and full of partial ground truths. Useful AI systems in this domain will require evaluation frameworks that capture robustness, transfer, mechanistic plausibility, and experimental value, not just benchmark performance on static datasets.

Direction

Going forward, I am interested in building tools and frameworks that make biological inference more reliable: systems that help researchers reason across heterogeneous evidence, identify failure modes earlier, and generate predictions biologists can trust.